A Local Habitation od-2

by Seanan McGuire

  Quentin looked up from feeding the Hippocampi. “What do you mean?”

  “They were normal.” I indicated the folder. “All were purebloods less than three hundred years old, all lived human at some point without cutting their ties to the Summerlands—nothing out of the ordinary. Barbara was local, and Yui was from Oregon, so there’s a West Coast pattern . . . only Colin was from Newfoundland, and Peter’s last listed residence was in Indiana.”

  “So what connects them?” Quentin asked, returning the Hippocampus food to the shelf where he’d found it.

  He was obviously expecting some ingenious, Sherlock Holmes-like gem of wisdom, and I hated to disappoint him. Unfortunately, I had no other options. “Nothing but ALH.” That worried me. Unless our killer was basing his moves on a factor I couldn’t see, we were dealing with someone whose only motive was “here.” That didn’t bode well. For one thing, it was a strong indicator that we might be looking for a crazy person.

  Insanity is dangerous. All fae living in the mortal world are at least a little nuts; it’s a natural consequence of being what we are. We have to convince ourselves that we can function in a place that’s run by people whose logic looks nothing like our own. When we do it well enough, we’re even right. The problem is that eventually, the lies stop working, and by that point, it’s generally too late to run.

  “Oh,” said Quentin, sounding disappointed.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “oh.”

  Something crackled in the air behind me. I didn’t pause to think; I just whirled, scattering file folders in my rush to put myself between Quentin and any potential threats. April’s outline flickered as the papers passed through her, fluttering to the floor. She watched impassively as they fell, finally asking, “Are you well?”

  “Don’t do that!” I said, dropping shakily back into my seat. Quentin looked as shocked as I felt. Good. That made him less likely to laugh at me later.

  “Why not?” She tilted her head, showing a flicker of curiosity. The fact that I’d just thrown several sheets of paper through her upper torso didn’t seem to bother her. Dryads are weird, but April was going for the grand prize.

  “Because it’s not polite to startle people.”

  “I see.” April looked to Quentin. “Is she correct?”

  Wordlessly, he nodded.

  “I see,” April repeated. After a moment’s consideration, she asked, “Is it my materialization you object to, or my doing so outside your immediate range of vision?”

  Quentin and I stared at her. She gazed back, bland curiosity in her yellow eyes. Now that I was looking more closely, I could see that her irises lacked normal variation; they looked almost painted-on. Her lack of small detail was making her seem more and more like something that was created, not born. That probably explained a lot about her, even if it didn’t change the fact that she’d just tripled my heart rate by deciding not to use the door like everybody else.

  “I object to having you appear behind me without warning,” I said.

  Quentin nodded. “That’s, um, pretty much my problem, too.”

  April smiled, an expression that looked entirely artificial. “Acceptable. I will refrain from abrupt materialization in your immediate vicinity without prior notification of my arrival.”

  It took me a moment to puzzle through that one. “So you won’t appear suddenly?” I guessed. I wasn’t going to make assumptions with someone who seemed to view silly things like “physics” as a mere convenience.

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” I glanced back toward Quentin, and saw that he was starting to relax again. “Can I help you with something?”

  “Mother says you are going to assist us.”

  “We’re going to try.”

  “Mother says you are here about the disconnection of the residents of this network.”

  Silence was becoming a major punctuation in this conversation. I looked to Quentin, who shook his head and spread his hands to show that he hadn’t understood it either. “What?”

  “The ones that have gone off- line. You will determine what has caused them to remain isolated from the network.”

  Oh. She was talking about the murders. “Yes. We’re going to find out why people are being killed.”

  She frowned, looking puzzled. Then the expression faded, and she asked, “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Somebody has to.”

  “That makes no sense,” she said, frowning again.

  “I rarely do. It’s one of my best traits.”

  Quentin snorted, trying not to laugh.

  “Gordan does not trust you,” April said.

  “I knew that, actually.”

  “Mother trusts you.” She shook her head. “I still do not know whether I trust you.”

  “I’m glad you can be honest about that,” I said. She was starting to unnerve me. There were too many little inconsistencies in the way she behaved and the way she was made, and it was getting harder to resist the urge to wave my hand through the space her body appeared to occupy just to find out whether or not she was there.

  “Honesty is the only sensible option.”

  Maybe for computer-powered Dryads, but the rest of Faerie seemed to be having a bit more of a problem with it. Slowly, I asked, “Why are you here?”

  “Mother requested that I notify you if any company personnel exited the presence of their assigned partners.”

  “And?”

  “Gordan and Terrie have departed from one another’s company.”

  Swell. “Message received. Where are they?”

  “Gordan is located in her cubicle. Terrie is located in the cafeteria.”

  “All right. Why don’t you go take care of whatever else you need to do, and I’ll see if I can explain to them why this isn’t okay, all right?”

  April gave me a long, measuring look, expression alien as ever. It was like watching an anthropologist trying to figure out a foreign culture—and who knows? Maybe that’s what she was doing. “Understood,” she said finally, and vanished in a flicker of static and ozone.

  “Right,” I said, eyeing the space where she’d been before turning to pull the keys out of my pocket and toss them to Quentin. He caught them without pausing to think; good reflexes.

  He gave me a bewildered look. “What are you giving me these for?”

  “I need to go knock some heads together. Repeatedly. I want you to lock yourself in.”

  “Uh.” Quentin’s eyebrows rose, expression turning dubious. “Have you never seen a horror movie in your entire life? Splitting the party is never a good idea.”

  “I got that. I also got the part where if I’m creeping around the knowe worrying about you, I’m even more likely to do something stupid. Stay put. Lock the door, and don’t let anyone in, even if they sound like me, unless they know the password.”

  “April isn’t going to use the door.”

  “I don’t really think April is particularly dangerous, unless you’re threatening her mom. Maybe you should see if you can get her to come back. Asking her some questions might be good for you.”

  “Toby—”

  “Just do it.”

  He looked like he was going to keep arguing. Then he sighed, shoulders sagging, and asked, “What’s the password?”

  I managed a fleeting smile as I rose and walked toward the door. “How about ‘do your homework’?”

  “Catty,” he said, forcing a smile of his own.

  “Exactly,” I said, and stepped out of the room. I waited in front of the door while Quentin closed and locked it, throwing the bolt with a decisive “click.” That done, I started down the hall.

  SIXTEEN

  I WAS STARTING TO FIND MY WAY AROUND. The hall where Colin’s office was located led to a larger hall, which led in turn to a pair of wide double doors that opened on the company lawn. A dozen cats were splayed on the grass, distributed around the door like spokes radiating from a wheel. They lifted their heads when I stepped out, watching my approach. I frown
ed. They’d come because of Barbara—if Tybalt was to be believed, she’d been the only true Cait Sidhe in Fremont—but they’d stayed for reasons of their own.

  That’s the thing about cats: they remember a time when there were true faerie kings for them to look at, not just Kings and Queens of Cats and the imitations we have today. Cats watch from corners and hearths, and they see history happening, and they never forget a minute. Some people say cats are the memory of Faerie, and that as long as there’s one cat that remembers us, Faerie will never die. People say some weird things, but sometimes, there’s truth there that we can’t see. They can say whatever they like about the cats of Faerie; I still say most of them are damned nuisances. And that includes mine.

  I crossed the lawn, stepping around cats as I walked toward the main building. They watched me intently, and I paused, frowning. Despite the feline population explosion on the grounds, I hadn’t seen a single cat inside. “You guys have a problem with enclosed spaces?” I asked. They didn’t respond, making no move to either follow or move away. “Right.”

  Shaking my head, I went inside.

  The emptiness of the main building was even eerier now that I knew what was happening. My footsteps echoed as I walked along the hall, heading toward the cubicle maze. More than anything, I wanted to evacuate the place—send the survivors home, or even back to Shadowed Hills, and figure out who our killer was without hanging around in this giant technological crypt. But that wasn’t going to happen.

  Jan and Elliot were in her office with the door open, passing a pencil back and forth as they bent over a set of incomprehensible blueprints. I paused to watch them. Jan raised her head, a silent question in her eyes, and I waved her off, resuming my patrol. She didn’t need to know that her people weren’t obeying the rules. Not unless they refused to listen to me when I told them off for it.

  The air-conditioning was off, and the hall lights were low as I walked back into the room where we’d first met the people of ALH. The catwalks were a series of smudges overhead. It looked like the sort of place frequented by brainless blondes in cheap horror movies; considering the number of bodies we’d found in the area, that wasn’t a bad comparison. Fortunately, I’ve never been inclined to wander down dead-end alleys in my underwear. Keeping my footsteps light, I started into the maze.

  I can’t move as silently as my mother—another consequence of my mortal blood—but years of practice have taught me a few things about being quiet. I stopped paying attention to where I was putting my feet as my eyes adjusted, concentrating on listening instead.

  A faint sound was drifting out of the maze to my left. Typing. I turned.

  Following the sound of Gordan working down the rows of cubicles did more to bring home what ALH had lost than every personnel file in the world. The desks were personalized with little touches; small toys, photographs, clusters of dried or dying flowers. A nameplate caught my eye, and I stopped. “Barbara Lynch.” The office we hadn’t been able to find.

  “There you are,” I breathed.

  The desk was covered in drifts of paper scribbled with complex calculations, while a pile of origami roses offered silent testimony to her preferred form of stress relief. Most of the papers tacked to the cube wall were work-related, with the exception of a poster of a kitten with the motto “hang in there” written in large, cartoony letters, and a photograph of a smiling man with white-blond hair. I removed the tack, turning the picture over to read the inscription on the back. “To my dearest Babs; a cat may look at a king. May I look at a cat? Love, John. ”

  Oh, damn. I smothered a sigh as I put the picture down. There weren’t any other photographs, which struck me as a little strange; if Gordan had been her best friend for as long as Alex seemed to think, I would have expected to find some sign of their relationship—a picture, a card, something. But there was nothing to indicate they’d ever met outside a professional context. I started shuffling through the papers littering the desktop, frowning. Most of what I found seemed fairly mundane; notes on troubleshooting the company’s latest software offerings, bug reports, documentation of program glitches.

  Barbara hadn’t been very highly ranked in the department; aside from her glaring lack of an office, the memos I could understand seemed to indicate that she’d been at the bottom of most of the corporate food chains. Whenever something went wrong, it seemed like Barbara took a lot of the blame. More tellingly, a lot of the blame was coming from Gordan. “Maybe they had a little falling-out,” I murmured, starting to test the drawers. Most opened easily.

  The top drawer was locked. Frown deepening, I knelt and peered at it. Jan would give me the key if I asked, but I wanted to think about it first. There was probably a perfectly logical reason for Barbara’s drawer to be locked; maybe someone kept stealing her pencils.

  Or maybe she was trying to hide something.

  Breaking cheap locks is just one of the fun skills I’ve picked up in my day job. It’s astounding how many divorces you can finalize with things that were protected by a fifty-cent tumbler in a standard-issue desk. I scanned the desktop until I spotted a paper clip. It took only a few seconds to straighten it out, and I bent back over the lock, makeshift lockpick in hand.

  Desk locks generally don’t take more than a minute to pop. This one was no different. After three sharp twists of the wire the tumblers slipped, and the drawer came open with a loud “click.” The sound of Gordan’s typing stopped for a moment, then resumed, just as rapid as before. With bated breath, I eased the drawer out of the desk and sat down on the floor, starting to sift through its contents.

  The top layer was fairly generic: announcements of company-wide events, torn envelopes, old pay stubs and blank steno pads. I flipped through them and set them aside, continuing to dig downward. More papers, more debris, none of it more complicated than the layers of silt that build up in every desk in the world. Her checkbook was buried at the bottom. I started to flip through it, noting the cute kittens on her checks before I reached the log of deposits and withdrawals. I stopped there, suddenly cold.

  Half the deposits were credited to “payday”: those were decently sized, indicating a respectable, if not show-stopping monthly income. Nothing suspicious about those. The other deposits, though . . .

  The labels said “contracting bonus.” They were almost as common as the payday deposits, and each was easily three times bigger. I may not know much about the computer industry, but I understand logic. If Barbara was making that much as an independent, she wouldn’t have needed ALH; the contracting payments alone covered her withdrawals and expenses. Whatever those payments were for, it wasn’t contract work.

  Tucking the checkbook into my jacket pocket, I started going through the drawer again. The remaining contents were nothing remarkable, and I quickly found myself at the bottom, with a heap of papers and office supplies on the floor beside me. I frowned, glancing from the debris to the empty drawer. When I broke into the desk, the top drawer was so full it was in danger of overflowing. Now, with the contents even less organized, I had a pile three inches shorter than the drawer was. Something was missing.

  Reaching into the drawer, I slid my fingers around the edges until I hit a dip in the back left corner. Jackpot. It only took a few minutes to pry the false bottom loose, leaving me free to study the rest of the drawer’s contents. I looked inside and stopped, eyes widening. At the top of the tidy pile of paper I’d just revealed was an envelope watermarked with the stars and poppies crest of Dreamer’s Glass.

  The envelope was unsealed. Careful to touch the paper as little as possible, I shook the contents into my hand: an uncashed check for an amount that matched the “contracting bonuses” listed in Barbara’s checkbook and a note that read “Enclosed please find payment for May’s activities. June’s report will be expected at the same time and place.” It was signed with the vast, looping squiggle of Duchess Riordan’s signature. If the crest hadn’t already told me what was going on, that would have cinched it.

/>   “Guess you won’t be making June’s report,” I said, and picked up the drawer, leaving the unnecessary pieces scattered on the floor. I needed to go through what I’d found more thoroughly, after I’d spoken to Jan and gotten back to Quentin. Tucking the drawer under my arm, I walked onward toward the sound of typing. I briefly considered the fact that stalking the sound of typing through a computer company just because I assumed it was someone I knew might not be my best idea ever—after all, if I were trying to attract computer programmers, I’d probably do it with an innocuous sound. Like typing.

  That disturbing train of thought pulled into the station as I turned the corner and found myself at Gordan’s cubicle. It was more devoid of personality than the others I’d passed, but I could tell who it belonged to: the fact that she was still sitting there was a pretty big clue. She raised her head and scowled as I approached, hitting a key at the top of her keyboard. Before the screen went dark, I caught a glimpse of a diagram as complex and snarled as one of Luna’s knitting projects. “What do you want?”

  The evidence I had under my arm was enough to prove that her best friend had been working for the opposition before she died. Feeling oddly exposed, I said, “April told me you were here. You know you shouldn’t be alone.”

  “You don’t know who the killer is. What makes me safer staying with them?”

  Touché. “I’m trying to do my job.” I was going to be nice if it killed me. She was probably as scared as I was, if not more. After her, it was her company under siege.

  “And it’s doing so much good.” She snorted. “I can see the improvements since you got here. What was I thinking?”

  My good nature only goes so far. “That’s not fair. We’re doing our best.”

  “It’s not? Gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. I guess it’s perfectly fair for you to suck face with Alex while my friends die?” I flinched. Gordan answered with a mocking smile, saying, “Honey, it’s obvious what you’ve been up to. Doesn’t it get cold out there on that hillside?”